Processed Culture?

         With what seems like the majority of the country enduring a record breaking cold winter, it is prime time for advertising industries to hit their cold, pale and worn-down customers with ads of beautiful white sand beaches and sunny blue skies. One of these ads that particularly made me ready to jump on a plane to the nearest port of call was one for a Caribbean cruise. Although I have never been on a cruise myself; I know that it is a huge industry, so I did some digging o One contributor, William Chalmers, to the Huffington Post thought critically about the of the genuineness that the cruise experience provided and posed the question, is this really traveling? He argued that "Cruise ship lines have turned travel into nothing more than just another shopping-spree experience aboard a floating hotel. Is a four-hour port visit (aka tourism villages) on a guided prepackaged highly sanitized outing through restored historical districts with processed on-demand culture."

He brought up an interesting point I had never really thought about. Are cruisers, and people on prepackaged travel tours really experiencing the countries they visit? Or
are they only experiencing, as Chalmers puts it, "processed culture". I feel like these travel companies do put these kinds of trips through some sort of filter. The people who work for the travel agency have to specifically pick which sites to see, and which to leave out. By choosing which ones they want to include in their tour, they are filtering what the travelers see and ultimately think about a certain location. Most of the time, as Chalmers notes in his articles, the sites that the tourists are led to are very manufactured. Places that are made for tourists, and not raw cultural experiences. 

With this said, I still believe that taking cruises and other packaged tours is a very meaningful experience. Touring places that are filtered by a travel company still gives the traveler more experience in another country than they would have had at home, but I think it necessary that the traveler understand that their tour may not immerse them in the true culture of a country in the way that they originally thought.